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Banking, Financial Services
August 19, 2019

KeyBank wins Celent Model Bank 2019 Award for its Digital Platform Transformation with Oracle

Guest Author

We are exhilarated that one of our Customers – KeyBank, wins Celent Model Bank 2019 Award for Digital Platform Transformation.

Redefining Customer Experience, from the Client Perspective

KeyBank is a leading super-regional retail bank in the United States, with US$138 billion in total assets as of December 31, 2018. It is the first super-regional bank to complete an IT transformation project of such scale. KeyBank completed the transformation while integrating its acquisition of First Niagara Financial Group (FNFG) into its operations and systems. The project, Digital 17, had the goal of accelerating KeyBank’s journey to become a fully digital bank across four significant transformational aspects.(Figure 1)

Figure 1: 4 Major Transformational Aspects of KeyBank’s Digital 17 project.

KeyBank adopted an agile delivery approach fueled by DevOps automation tools. The tools enabled them to deliver the system change rapidly during the project as well as when the project went live. With this technology adoption, KeyBank redesigned its Retail Banking user interface to be digital-centric, bringing an overall improvement in their customer experience.

Impact of the Digital Transformation

The transformation saw a 17% increase in the number of digitally active Customers for KeyBank. Their Net Promoter score also improved 15% year over year. Notably, KeyBank’s app store rating jumping from 2.5 to 4.5, an all-time high for the bank. KeyBank also saw its new banking product rollout time reduced from 9 months average to a monthly basis. Their Internet and native mobile apps also share 80% of their code base, reducing maintenance costs and code deployment time. Further details of the transformation impact in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Summary of Key Impact, KeyBank’s Digital Transformation.

The Celent Model Bank awards are given for Best Practices of technology usage in different areas critical to the success of a bank. Banks judged on the three main evaluation criteria of Demonstrable Business Benefits, Degree of Innovation, and Technology / Implementation excellence. KeyBank won the award for Digital Platform Transformation due to the significant improvement in its retail banking client experience, its IT cost savings and the technological flexibility achieved. Technology-enabled KeyBank’s growth, facilitating its integration with First Niagara Financial Group. Celent assessed this as a critical core competency for US super-regional banks.

Find out more about KeyBank’s Digital Journey